We’ve All Gone Back To The Future Now

I don’t need to tell you that today is Future Day. The internet is positively brimming with memes and articles aplenty. The latter either praising the things Spielberg, Zemeckis et al. got right, or moaning about the continued absence of hoverboards.

​We’re back again to the problem of a target being too big not to hit. There’s a lot of repetition out there. I’d like to read the article that ponders a scenario where future day had become a known quantity in the Back to the Future universe. Imagine, Marty, Doc and Jennifer fly into Hill Valley only to be greeted by a parade and mob of people who had all been waiting for them to arrive.

In BTTF Part 2, Doc famously has to explain the plot on a blackboard at one point. It’s one of Zemeckis’s career high points. He couldn’t believe that he’d got away with making such a bizarre SF movie with such a huge budget. Admittedly Part 2 took it’s time getting the appreciation it deserved. Nevertheless, the sheer oddness of Part 2 has to be one of the most appealing things about the whole trilogy.

I don’t think there would have been a chalk line straight enough for an explanation of the situation Marty would find himself flying into today. If Hill Valley really existed, there’d be live webcams, flash mobs, McFly selfies, the whole banana. All of this brings us to the real point.

Today is Future Day and, gosh darn it, we are living in the future.

I am writing this article using a word processor. The words are displayed on an android tablet and are typed via a bluetooth keyboard while I commute to work in Cardiff on the train. The document is being written into Google Docs, that means that the minute my tablet is back online, the document will fly off into the cloud and synchronize across all the places I access Google Drive from.

That paragraph would have made no sense to someone in 1985.

Sure, we don’t have flying cars. Well, we do, but not for general use. The fact is that manual flight is just too difficult for it to be implemented for a mass commercial market place. The self-driving car is now real. They’re being used in a pilot in California and when that trial is successful, they will become more widespread. Within a decade probably more than half the cars on the road will not need human operators.​

​We live in the future, Future Day is today.

I’ve already talked about the technical marvel of my tablet and bluetooth keyboard. Both devices take up a tiny amount of space in the bag I carry around with me on a daily basis. Between the tablet and my phone, I have astronomically more computing power than the Apollo missions and more storage space than could be held in a twenty storey building’s worth of filing cabinets.

If I want to know something, I can tap into the vast resource of the internet and find facts, reviews and opinions in seconds. I can do this from just about anywhere in the Western world. When I get in my car, I can use the onboard computer to guide me to a destination. The system uses a transponder fitted into the car that bounces its signal off satellites to deliver my position on a map to the GPS in real time.

We live in the future. We don’t have self lacing sneakers and dehydrated pizza, but that doesn’t prove anything.

Michael J. Fox did a great job of stumbling around the 2015 of BTTF Part Two looking befuddled. If Marty McFly really got to take a tour of Google Headquarters or play about with a tablet device, his mind really would have been blown.

So happy Future Day, everyone. Our feet may be bound by gravity, but where the vision and imagination of technological development reaches, we will never, ever need roads.

​Are you happy to be living in the future, or are you still moaning about hoverboards? Either way, let us know below!